The difference between an "appliance" and using an installer

I have a Pinebook Pro (an ARM-based laptop) for which there is an openSUSE wiki entry. This page lists several “constantly updated” Tumbleweed images which, when written to disk, gives me a Tumbleweed install with a default root account and an ext4 file system.

On the openSUSE Tumbleweed download page I can download an aarch64 installer image which, as far as I know, should work for my Pinebook as well since I have a UEFI U-Boot firmware.

Am I correct that the images made available on the wiki page are “appliance” images, meaning they’re pre-configured installations? Does this imply that using the regular aarch64 installer will leave my Pinebook with a sub-optimal configuration?

I’d like to have a Tumbleweed install with an encrypted Btrfs-formatted disk, but hesitate to start over again using the installer in case there was a good reason the appliance image was configured the way it is.

Thank you!